!

"# %&'()#&' %&'*#+,-

. !"'/0", 12)#&34#5,

6 7#83(3'5 9: ;<= >?@A 6

William L. Benzon



Abstract: Prospero is a thought experiment, a computer program powerful
enough to simulate, in an interesting way, the reading of a literary text. To do
that it must simulate a reader. Which reader? Prospero would also simulate
literary criticism, and controversies among critics. The point of Prospero, if
we could build it, is the knowledge required to build it. If we had it, we could
examine its activities as it reads and comments on texts. But our knowledge
of Prospero is of a different kind and order from our knowledge of the world
and of life, though those things are central to literary texts. The point of this
thought experiment is to clarify that difference, for that is what we will have
to do to build a naturalist literary criticism grounded in the neuro-, cognitive,
and evolutionary psychologies. Though contemplation of this experiment we
can see that, whatever computing promises literary study, it will not yield
automatic interpretive procedures.



Stanley Fish Issues a Challenge ............................................................................................... 1
Simulation and the Logic of Science ....................................................................................... 2
Prospero ...................................................................................................................................... 3
The Fruits of Simulation ........................................................................................................... 6
From Here to There, Why? ....................................................................................................... 7
The Key to the Treasure ........................................................................................................ 9







bbenzon@mindspring.com



This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 Unported
License.





- 1 -

!"# %&'()#&' %&'*#+,-
. !"'/0", 12)#&34#5,


Back in the mid-1970s a journal then called Computers and Humanities invited my
teacher, David Hays, to write a review of recent work in computational linguistics.
Hays was a natural for the job. Hed been involved in computational linguistics from
the beginning, was then the editor of the leading journal in the field, American Journal
of Computational Linguistics (AJCL), and had recently written about Language and
Interpersonal Relationships for Ddalus.
Hays asked me to draft the article. I was his student at the time and, more directly
germane to the task at hand, I was in charge of abstracting the current literature for
AJCL. I was of course pleased and flattered to do so.
We began the article by defining computational linguistics and concluded it with a
fantasy, a computer program so powerful that it was capable of reading Shakespeare
texts in a way that was interesting but not human. We called it Prospero. It was a
reasonable fantasy at the time. I figured that we might have such a Prospero system in
twenty years. Hays knew better and refused to put dates on such fantasies.
He was right. Do the math. The article, Computational Linguistics for the
Humanist, was published in 1976; twenty years from then would have been 1996.
Nothing remotely like the Prospero wed envisioned was available then. Nor is it
available now, almost forty years since we published that article. I have no idea when,
if ever, such a wonder will be possible.
Just why I got it so wrong beyond the usual youth and foolishness is not
obvious. And I cant quite remember how I thought about such things in those days.
But I suspect one factor is that I didnt realize then, as I do know, that a Prospero
simulation would require a simulation of the human mind. All of it, more or less. Back
then I was thinking that, if we could do language, we could do Prospero. But language
isnt all of what we are.
No, it isnt. But there is more to a Shakespeare play than the language in which it is
written and spoken. To a first approximation, there is all that it means to be human,
certainly no more, and not much less.
Why then am I trotting out this failed thought experiment? Its failure is beside the
point. To be sure, this is a new and improved version, but the improvements do
nothing to stave off that failure. No, I trot it out because it IS a thought experiment,
and thought experiments can be useful. The object of this experiment is to think about
literature and its study in a fairly general way.
Literature may be about living life, in some sense it may even BE living life, but the
study of literature is at one remove from that. Prospero is an attempt to clarify that
difference.
!"#$%&' )*+, -++.&+ # /,#%%&$0&
Let us begin with some remarks by the redoubtable Stanley Fish. In his seminal essay
on "Literature in the Reader: Affective Stylistics" (Is There a Text in this Class? Harvard
University Press 1980, pp. 21-67) Fish made the general point that the pattern of
expectations, some satisfied and some not, which is set up in the process of reading
literary texts is essential to the meaning of those texts. Hence any adequate analytic
method must describe that temporal pattern.
In the course of developing his argument Fish asserted that What is required,
then, is a method, a machine if you will, which in its operation makes observable, or at
least accessible, what goes on below the level of self-conscious response (Affective
Stylistics in Text, p. 32). The Prospero Project takes Fish's call for a machine literally


- 2 -
and imagines what literary study might be like if we had such a machine. However
interesting it would be directly to observe someone's mind as they read a text, I don't
imagine the Prospero machine to be an observation device a sort of electron
microscope of the mind. No, Prospero machine is a computer, one that we can use to
simulate mental processes. We can thus set Prospero to simulating a reading and then
examine the steps that Prospero takes in doing this simulation.
But would Fish be interested in such a machine? In What is Stylistics and Why
Are They Saying Such Terrible Things About It? Fish takes a look at what the linguist
M. A. K. Halliday does with a sentence from Through the Looking Glass (Text, p. 80):
When a text is run through Hallidays machine, its parts are first disassembled, then
labeled, and finally recombined into their original form. The procedure is a
complicated one, and it requires a great many operations, but the critic who
performs them has finally done nothing at all.
Precisely so, nothing at all. Its all in those procedures, which constitute a theory or
model of the minds operation.
Fishs talk of a machine is metaphorical in both cases, when he said Halliday had
one and when he wished for one to examine reading processes. Halliday did not have
a computer; he just had rules. But then thats what computers do, they execute rules.
To the somewhat questionable extent that the human mind is a computer, it too
executes rules. We have no way of opening up the mind and making a trace of the
rules it executed while, say, reading Hamlet. But we could do that with a computer.
Why then did Fish wish for a machine in one case (Affective Stylistics) and
repudiate it in the other (What is Stylistics?), both written at about the same time,
1970? Most likely because he didnt know what he was talking about. Back then
computers were largely unknown to all but the small group of people who actually
used them. People knew of them, but few actually worked with them or had any
substantial idea of how the hardware or software functioned. Fish certainly knew of
computers, but little more. But the ambivalence he expressed back then is till with us
today. Think of Prospero as existing in that ambivalence.
!"#$%&'"() &)+ ',- .(/"0 (1 !0"-)0-
What is simulation? And how can a computer do it? By and large simulation is used to
study things happening in time. You create an abstract model of some phenomenon,
transform that model into a computer program, and then run the computer program.
For example, you are interested in studying how snowflakes form. You might model
this process by a cellular automaton. A cellular automaton is some collection of very
simple computers each much simpler than the simplest calculator or digital watch
connected together. Each of these computers is a cell in the automaton. At any given
moment in time, each computer in the automaton can be in one of several states (a
great deal of interesting work can be done with computers having only two states, in
effect, "on" and "off," or "black" and "white"). Just exactly which state depends on its
own state at the previous moment and the states of its neighbors at the previous
moment. The cellular automaton is thus defined by:

a pattern of connections between neighboring cells (computers),
a repertoire of states possible for each cell,
the rules governing the moment by moment transitions between states.

To simulate the process of snowflake formation with a cellular automaton we have to
define a particular cellular automaton to be our model.
Snowflakes are hexagonal crystals. This suggests that we want a hexagonal
arrangement of cells in our model. Thus, each computer in the automaton will be
surrounded by six neighbors. In one well-known model each cell can be in one of two
states, water vapor (assigned a value of 0) or ice (assigned a value of 1). The snowflake
starts with one ice cell and grows only by adding new ice cells at its boundary.
Consider some vapor cell on the boundary of the growing flake. If the sum of the


- 3 -
values for its six neighbors is odd, then, at the next moment, this cell will turn to ice; if
the some of the values for its six neighbors is even, then it will remain vapor at the
next moment. That, in an informal way, is a model for snowflake growth.
To simulate that model we have to run it on a computer. Now, as I have said, a
cellular automaton is a collection of simple computers. We could perform our
simulation by building a collection of simple computers, wiring them together in a
hexagonal array. But that is unnecessary. All that is essential to any of the computers
in the array is the set of states and rules that define it. We can simulate the entire array
even if it contains thousands of individual computers (cells) on a single computer
simply by having that computer calculate the state of each cell in succession and then
saving that result in memory. That is much easier than building a special-purpose
snowflake computer and so that is what we do. We program a single electronic
computer to simulate an array of computers that was, in turn, designed to simulate the
process by which snowflakes are formed.
Simulation is a relatively new conceptual tool, depending as it does on the
computer as a vehicle for performing the simulation. It does not, however, change the
logic by which scientific theories are validated, or, as Karl Popper would have us
believe, falsified. At any particular stage in its life, a scientific theory consists of an
abstract model, which is the theory proper, and a body of observations that are
consistent with that model. The scientist considers this body of knowledge and
suggests, on the basis of his manipulations of the abstract model, further observations,
specifying what we should see under certain circumstances. The circumstances are
created - either in the laboratory, or, as in astronomy, by making observations of
phenomena too large or distant to be brought into the laboratory - and the observed
phenomena are compared with the predictions generated from the theory. If the match
is appropriately close the model is held to be true; if the match is not close, then the
model must be revised. Simulation is a technique for exploring the implications of a
particular model, generating the observational possibilities needed to validate it.
Moving back to our particular example, snowflake formation involves water
vapor, ice, temperature and air (which hasn't even been included in the model, which
is only, and ever, an idealization). The simulation involves electric currents in
integrated circuit chips. Between these two we have the abstract model, the hexagonal
cellular automaton. That model captures (some of) our knowledge of the process of
snowflake formation. To validate that knowledge we must, of course, compare the
performance of simulations with actual observations of snowflake formation. If the
two do not match, then we must revise our model and run the simulation again,
repeating this whole process until the match between simulation and observation is
satisfactory.
I propose that the robust study of literature, or of any but the simplest mental
phenomena, requires simulation. We have to create models of the processes by which
the mind sees, hears, feels, desires, talks, and thinks and then run those models on
literary texts. We cannot directly observe, in any detail, "what goes on below the level
of self-conscious response," but we could easily observe what goes on in a computer
simulation of such response. If that simulation is embedded in an intellectual milieu in
which its various modules have variously been validated, in some cases by
observational tools available to us, including noninvasive techniques for studying
brain activity, in other cases by observational tools we cannot now imagine, then we
have all we need for a scientific discipline. We have an abstract model - the simulation
- and the means of observationally validating that model. The following thought
experiment assumes this, for us, fantastic scientific milieu.
!"#$%&"#
The point of the Prospero Project is to imagine that we are in some future time, not the
immediate future (10 - 20 years), but not the distant future either (1000 or more years),
where it is possible to run nontrivial simulations of the human mind. Of course, some
work of this nature is going on now. Some researchers are simulating the activity of


- 4 -
cells in the nervous system; others work on natural language processing, such as
translating a paragraph in English into a paragraph in Chinese. While I will explain
some of this work in a later chapter - for, crude though it may be, it does have
intellectual value - for now its only value is its suggestiveness.
So, let us be bold and imagine that we possess an ensemble of computers and
programs that can simulate a rich range of human thought and feeling. What do we,
as literary researchers, do with this ensemble, called Prospero? For one thing, we can
have Prospero read (i.e. simulate the reading of) various literary texts - The Iliad, Giles
Goat Boy, Hamlet, Ode on a Grecian Urn, Salambo, The Extasie, whatever you
please. What could we learn in this way? After all, the most Prospero could possibly
do is to duplicate human performance exactly, and it is human performance which
seems to be lacking. We, human literary critics, cannot agree on what these texts are
about, what can we expect from computers, which can do no more than we can?
We cannot, however, explicitly examine what is going on inside our souls, our
heads and hearts, to use metaphors, inside our nervous system, to be literal. The
illusion of introspective access to our minds had its philosophical comforts, but those
comforts were shattered by Freud. If we cannot explicitly examine what is going on
inside our brains, than neither can Prospero. However, Prospero is only a computer,
designed, built, and operated according to principles that we understand. Therefore
we can examine what is going on inside Prospero as it "reads" these texts. That
examination might tell us a great deal about reading. The variety of simulations open
to us would be as astonishing as the variety of books in Borges's Library of Babel.
For example, we could have Prospero simulate various types of Elizabethans as
they read, or attend, or even enact, Hamlet. We could thus compare the mental
processes of a skilled actor, a mediocre one, one acting Hamlet, another Ophelia, a
middle-aged merchant reading at home, in the quiet of the evening after a hectic day
getting a shipment unloaded and into his warehouse, a countess out for an evening of
theatre (with her well-dressed, but somnolent, husband). We could also do the same
with (the simulation of) a Victorian matron - we can even expose her to the novelty
and horror of an unexpurgated Hamlet. And why not see what Saxo-Grammaticus, or
Sophocles, or Confucius, or, for that matter, Tom Sawyer or Jay Gatsby, would make
of Hamlet? If Prospero is possible at all, then all of these things would also be possible.
What would we find once we had simulated all these Hamlet's? On that question I
will remain silent. The mere possibility of doing such a things is sufficiently taxing to
my imagination. I can see no point in further trying to imagine what the results of
such investigations would be. It should be obvious, however, that literary scholars in
this future will have a very different intellectual agenda. A number of critics currently
talk of reader response theory. But that reader, and his or her responses, is generally
just an ideal reader created primarily to allow the critic to talk of time and expectation.
Very little reader response criticism is concerned with the responses of real readers,
either as individuals, or a representative of various groups of people. With Prospero
scholars can simulate the activities of hosts of readers and compare the results. We
could also prepare various versions of a single text and compare the different
responses one reader would have to these various versions, thus allowing us to gain
insight into the various dimensions of the text. What happens to a reader, any reader,
some particular reader, whatever strikes your fancy, if The Sun Also Rises is altered so
that there is no hint of Jake Barnes being physically castrated, if the journey to the bull
fights at Pamplona is replaced by a pilgrimage to Lourdes, if Brett Ashley marries a
middle-aged Pedro Romero, if Hemingway's style is replaced byRaymond Chandler's?
And we can concentrate on one text, and one reader, but vary that reader's age and
mental state. Let's have one reader, shall we say a black woman born in 1950 in Detroit
to a working class family. In 1971, during her senior year at Wayne State University,
she reads A Passage to India in a literature course. It's the end of the semester, exams
and projects are pressing in other courses, she reads it when she can, sometimes late at
night, sometimes while drinking boatloads of coffee (to keep her awake while
studying). What does she get out of it then? What does she get out of it when she
reads it later that summer (something stuck to her the first time through and she


- 5 -
wants to read it again), the week before she takes a secretarial job? We move ahead
fourteen years, she's divorced, has two children, and is an administrative assistant to a
Michigan senator. She goes on a date, in Washington, where she is now living, and
sees David Lean's movie. She rereads the book - not much more time available to her
now than when she was at Wayne State, but the mechanisms of racial and sexual
politics Forster exposes are more consciously pressing. How does she experience the
book in these circumstances? And how does the book feel when she rereads it in late
November of 2000 when, at the age of 50, she becomes the first black Vice President of
the United States? Or, we could take the same college senior and run her through a
different life experience, bring her to the bottom of society, get her deeply involved
with drugs and prostitution, destroy part of her brain in a shooting she's trying to
protect her pimp from the police, or, her younger sister from her pimp, or, the police
are trying to protect her from her pimp, whatever TV detective show plot seems to
work for you, and still, if somewhat implausibly (think, though, of William Burroughs
or Jean Genet), have her rereading A Passage to India.
With Prospero we can simulate a wide range of readers reading a wide range of
texts. We can vary particular texts in many ways. And we can also vary particular
individual readers in various ways. We can examine what goes on in these various
simulations how Prospero anticipates a certain textual event, see what happens
when that expectation is satisfied, or not; how a particular sonnet yields an epiphany
(yes, Prospero will have to simulate epiphanies) in line 13, which doesn't happen
when relatively minor alterations in wording destroy the rhythm of lines 11 and 12;
how a given text never really seems to work for thirty-year olds, who seem not to
attend deeply to some portions of the text, but works fine for fifty-year olds, who do
attend deeply to those portions of the text ignored by the thirty-years (but aren't so
interested in other portions); how West Side Story moves people who are bored with
Romeo and Juliet.
On the assumption that readers are changed through reading we would have to
endow Prospero with that capacity as well. One obvious kind of change is that, having
read The Big Sleep, for example, Prospero would now remember that text and those
memories would be available in reading subsequent texts. But just how much of the
text would Prospero remember? Would Prosper remember exact passages or just
summaries? How accurate would those summaries be? But there are other kinds of
changes. How does reading change Prosperos attitudes, for example?
*

Thus we can investigate how literature is made from language, thoughts, images,
feelings, sounds, desires. For all of these things, these mental objects/events, are
simulated in Prospero. To analyze a text we have to set-up Prospero as a reader with
a particular background, personality, and knowledge, or perhaps even as an idealized
reader and then have Prospero simulate a reading of that text. Then we analyze what
happens in Prospero during the simulation.
We can of course do even more. So far I have been implicitly assuming that we use
Prospero to do nothing but read a text, with our interest being only in examining what
happens in Prospero as it does so. But we could also ask Prospero questions about the
text and analyze what happens as Prospero sets about answering those questions. We
could have Prospero write critical essays. We could school Prospero in any one of
various schools of interpretation myth criticism, New Criticism, psychoanalytic,
deconstruction, reader response, whatever. And then we can simulate critical debates,
between different critics adopting one methodology, between critics using different
methodologies. By going beyond even this to having Prospero simulate the activities
of writers, editors, publishers, booksellers, and reviewers, we could simulate the entire
culture of literature.
As a real project, this is absurd. As a thought experiment

* I added this paragraph at the suggestion of Jim Hoagland, who pointed out to me
that Prospero would be changed by its operation.


- 6 -
!"# %&'()* +, -(.'/0)(+1
But what kind of knowledge would all of this yield? The general answer is simple: the
knowledge required to build the simulations. To the extent that we can compare the
results of these simulations with the real processes that they simulate, we can validate
the knowledge behind the simulation models. I am, however, working toward a more
specific point.
Let us return to Stanley Fish. Though Fish, to my knowledge, never imagined
anything like Prospero, we can now read Prospero where he says Hallidays
machine in the following passage, which weve seen above (Is There a Text in this
Class? 1980, 80):
When a text is run through Halliday's machine, its parts are first disassembled,
then labeled, and finally recombined into their original form. The procedure is
a complicated one, and it requires a great many operations, but the critic who
performs them has finally done nothing at all.
Leaving aside the issue of whether or not Fish is fair to Halliday, his statement about
the use of Halliday's machine, which is a machine only in metaphor, applies rather
well to Prospero, which really is a machine, a computer (though one which exists only
in imagination Halliday's analytic methods are quite real). The critic who uses
Prospero does nothing at all to the text that is Prospero's job. Prospero does not yield
interpretations, unless, of course we are using it to simulate interpretation.
Fish had characterized Halliday as one of many lured on by the promise of an
automatic interpretive procedure (p. 78). If I read him correctly, Alan Liu believes
that lure is alive and well today, in the form of what he calls the tabula rasa
interpretation. In a recent article in The Meaning of the Digital Humanities (PMLA
128, 2013, 409-423) Liu discusses some recent work (Ryan Heuser and Long Le-Khacs
A Quantitative Literary History of 2,958 Nineteenth-Century British Novels: The Semantic
Cohort Method, May 2012, 68 page PDF) where the investigators use techniques of
machine learning to examine large collections of texts. In some techniques the
investigators prime the procedure so as to guide it. But there are other techniques
where there is no priming. Of these procedures, Liu says, They help advance an
important, general digital humanities goal that might be called tabula rasa
interpretationthe initiation of interpretation through the hypothesis-free discovery
of phenomena. That tabula rasa interpretation looks awfully like Fishs automatic
interpretive procedure, one operating without human intervention.
And both look like a vision of prelapsarian communion with the text. Fish invokes
the metaphor of a machine and then goes on to argue that the criticism that results
from the application of that machine is empty. Liu, in contrast, is writing about a real
machine, that is, a piece of software running on a digital computer. And, in the context
of that particular essay Liu is arguing that the investigators, Heuser and Le-Khac, do
not actually have that tabula rasa procedure because one of the critical steps in their
methodology the use of the Historical Thesaurus of the Oxford English Dictionary
depended on a great deal of human interpretive activity.
Note then, that we now have a real machine in place of a metaphorical one. That
real machine, in effect, embodies a considerable methodology that is now explicit and
open to examination. The fictional Prospero that I am imagining would embody
considerably more knowledge. What do we learn from that fiction?
We learn that an automatic interpretive procedure, a tabula rasa interpretation, is
somewhere between highly unlikely and impossible. Most immediately Prospero
yields traces, traces of simulated of neural and mental structures and processes that
are quite unlike anything we now have. Because those traces are the actions of a
machine we have built, the critic can examine and then analyze and generalize over
them. But those traces and not themselves an interpretation, a reading, at least not as
critics have understood the notion for the last half-century. If we want the machine to
produce a recognizable (simulation of an) interpretation we have to program it or
teach it to do so.


- 7 -
The critic who finds himself trapped in the vertiginous gloom and dissolution of
Nightwood, and who uses interpretation as a means of dealing with the conflict
between that in himself which is drawn to Nightwood and that which is repelled, will
find no solace, nor even any insight, through Prospero. Even if Prospero is all we are
imagining it to be, even if that critic is able to reproduce his or her own mind inside
Prospero, and then examine what happens in Prospero as it reads Nightwood, thus
knowing all there is to know about his response to the text, not even then will
Prospero be capable, even in principle, of satisfying the intention which pitched the
critic into interpretation.
Nor should we see anything particularly surprising, or shocking, in this situation.
For it is, in fact, a familiar one, well known to psychoanalysts and their patients. Being
able to discourse about one's own mind, unconscious as well as conscious, learnedly
and even truthfully, is not equivalent to undergoing analysis. It is one thing to know
what one must work through, and why one must work through it. The working
through is a different matter. The critic examining Prospero's simulation of his own
reading of Nightwood is in a position analogous to that of a person who understands,
theoretically, what his or her neurosis is, and what it will take to work it through. That
the critic can describe, in an exceedingly abstract theoretical language, exactly what is
bothering him, or her, does not mean he or she can thereby resolve the problem. That
is a different kind of problem, requiring a different intentional attitude.
I have said that whereas an analysis is animated by the question How is the text
made? interpretation is animated by the question What does the text mean? Behind
the interpretive question there is often another question, one which professional
decorum generally denies us What is the meaning of Life? The interpreter, in his
role as a critic, takes the text as a clue to that meaning; the analyst, in his role as a
critic, does not. However problematic life's meaning is, it is not a problem well suited
for scientific analysis - which is what Prospero is for, the scientific study of literature.
However, if Prospero is to be adequate, then it must simulate our need for
meaning in life. It is quite clear that we human beings do need meaning in our lives -
though we are not at all clear on just what we mean by meaning in that context. The
need must be part of our nature, it must, in some way we cannot now guess, be
written in the structure of our brains. Thus, where the literary interpreter is animated
by a need to know the meaning of life, the literary analyst must work from a
conception of what human beings are up to in their quest for meaning.
And so a simulation of this quest, and the need which drives it, will be part of
Prospero though I doubt that the incorporation of this need will take the form of a
meaning of life module, rather it will be some property of the entire system. A
central feature of any Prospero analysis would be to see how various texts answer our
need for meaning and coherence in our lives. The use of Prospero will not, itself,
produce that meaning and coherence, but it should tell us how, at least for the
moment, we can, through reading literary texts, experience that meaning and see the
coherence.
!"#$ &'"' (# )*'"'! #$%&
Prospero is an experiment only in thought. Its purpose is to indicate what I think the
analytic study of literature should be like. The purpose of literary theory is, in effect, to
tell us how to build Prospero. To do so it must deal with specific texts, deriving its
descriptive and explanatory categories from texts. And from a host of disciplines at
the margins of literature linguistics, psychology, anthropology, history, and so on.
The plausibility of this theoretical program is based, in part, on current work in the
computer simulation of human mental processes in artificial intelligence, cognitive
science, and computational linguistics. We certainly cannot build Prospero now nor
could we do so with any reasonable extrapolation from what we now know. From one
point of view this certainly makes Prospero, and its implied intellectual program,
pointless.


- 8 -
That is not my point of view. But that program, to the extent that it succeeds, will
itself make Prospero, as a goal, pointless. My point is not the deconstructive paradox
that all intellectual systems undermine themselves, often most radically at their point
of highest success though I might believe this. My point is a bit different.
The distance between here and there really is substantial. A great deal of
conceptual development is going to be required to get us there. For example, lets
consider the sorts of artificial intelligence systems that have been built for natural
language processing, such as translation from one language to another. In the previous
century the most sophisticated of these systems are centered on some knowledge
representation. (The most sophisticated current systems are built on statistical
techniques of machine learning.) Knowledge about some domain domains that have
been explored include toy blocks on a flat surface, submarines and battleships,
restaurants, stories of drowning that has been painstakingly hand-coded in this
formalism. This hand-coded knowledge is what the system uses to understand the
texts it is dealing with. If it is presented with a text dealing in some other domain it is
helpless. Syntax and pragmatics (and, for speech understanding systems, phonetics
and phonology) are added to this semantic base. They are hand-coded as well.
All of this hand-coding takes a great deal of time and very few people know how
to do it, even fewer know how to do it well. It has been clear for quite awhile that
really large intelligent systems cannot be hand-coded in this way. They are going to
need the ability to learn. A relatively small system (large perhaps by current
standards, but small in relation to its eventual size) will be hand-coded and then let
loose in an informatic environment where it will voraciously acquire new knowledge.
No doubt we will spend some time explicitly teaching these systems; and perhaps we
may even have more sophisticated systems teaching less sophisticated systems.
More informally, these systems will also learn simply by reading, as we often do.
But, though there is research being done on learning, it has not developed any deep
and powerful principles about human learning. Most of our knowledge about human
learning, whether it is behaviorist, cognitive, or developmental in intellectual style,
cannot be applied to the problem of creating computer programs that learn. This
knowledge isn't in a form where it can be used in such systems, or, if you prefer, such
systems haven't developed to the point where they can use what we know about
learning. Either way there is a considerable gap.
And learning is only one of the areas where we lack fundamental theoretical
knowledge. Visual perception merely recognizing that a dog is a dog and an apple is
an apple is another area where we lack fundamental knowledge. Motivation and
emotion two more lacunae.
My suspicion is that in order to make fundamental intellectual progress in any one
of these areas we are going to have to develop theoretical models which are as
different from our current ones as the Darwinian account of human origins is from
origin myths in which human beings are created by supernatural beings. But, the
entire Prospero thought experiment has been constructed in intellectual terms
available to us now. The underlying distinction between interpretation and analysis
reflects current categories. The idea that Prospero must embody models of perception,
thinking, feeling and desiring a quartet I have repeated several times reflects
current categories. Certainly, the phenomena we group under those headings must be
accounted for; but we have no particularly good reason to believe those headings will
survive. There was, after all, at time when, for example, the categories of humor
psychology seemed natural, but they haven't survived into our post-Freudian world.
The move toward an intellectual regime in which Prospero becomes increasingly
possible will undermine the intellectual regime in which Prospero has been imagined.
By the time we are halfway to building Prospero we are likely to have a different
intellectual agenda before us.
At the moment, however, I find Prospero useful in thinking about what is entailed
in asking the question How are literary texts made? It makes it clear that the
program following from that question cannot answer to the question What is the
meaning of life? or some derivative or relative of that question. But it must, in some


- 9 -
way, be able to show how literature answers to that question, realizing, of course, that
that question is but a verbal formulation of an intentional attitude whose roots are
deeper than language.
For example, Levi-Strauss's early work on myth derived myth structures from
contradictions and gaps in our conceptual systems. Mythic thought attempts to heal
those gaps by generating a series of binary oppositions such that each opposed pair
embodies one particular conceptual distinction, but in a less extreme form than the
previous pair. That is the sort of concept we need.
The Life-Problem, in this view: uncomfortable conceptual gaps. The solution: a
succession of milder and milder oppositions. I don't in fact think this is an adequate
account of myth and, for all practical purposes, Levi-Strauss abandoned it in his
Mythologiques but it is an example of the kind of conceptualization we need. By
pursuing ideas like this we can get, I believe, a theory of literary form. It will,
however, take this entire book to make that particular speculation plausible.
Prospero also makes it clear that finding how literary texts are made goes far
beyond the question of literary language. And language is, of course, more than
sounds in the air and marks on paper. Here we face a problem analogous to that
which Leonard Bloomfield faced in linguistics. He declared semantics to be outside
the pale of linguistics because, to construct an account of semantics, one would have to
construct a complete theory of knowledge. Bloomfield's view held right up through
Chomsky and even generative semantics looks more like syntax than semantics. The
way out of Bloomfield's problem is to realize that it is the form of semantics that we
need to understand. Knowledge itself is inexhaustible; but its form may not be if it is,
well, that will be a wonder of wonders.
!"# %#& '( '"# !)#*+,)#-
And so it goes with literature. It is obvious that literary texts, in their content, call on
an extremely wide range of semiotic systems. Anything which people do is likely to
turn up in some text, hence the sign system which governed that doing played a role
in that text. And it is also obvious that literary texts, almost regardless of content, call
on a full range of mental processes sensory, cognitive, and affective. All of these are
relevant to literary studies and our current interdisciplinary expansiveness reflects
this. What is special to literary studies alone, however, is just how all of these signs
and processes are organized in our experiences of literature. That sounds, again, like a
question of literary form.
But I do not think it a question of form that can be answered in a formalist or New
Critical way. That intellectual enterprise is in the process of exhausting itself. Rather,
we must make strategic sorties into other disciplines, not so that we continue the
reduction of literature to psychology, or anthropology, or sociology, or linguistics, or
anything else, but so that we can more deeply understand how literature has
constructed itself from its diverse materials. I cannot offer any explicit methodological
rules for making such sorties I don't have any.
I can offer only examples of what I do and, of course, references to the work that
has most influenced me.
What Prospero is, above all else, is an opportunity to explore a new intellectual
world. Are we brave enough to make the journey?